Our Story

Growing up in a small town with a passionate hockey community, a father, James, watched his three young girls lace up their skates with dreams of reaching the PWHL, the highest level of women's professional hockey in the world. While the heart and hustle were there, their hometown didn't have the specialized training facilities or off-season ice time found in bigger cities.

The inspiration behind it all—putting in the work to reach the PWHL.

As a software engineer, he understood that achieving such ambitious goals required more than just passion - it demanded innovative training methods, deliberate practice, and tools that could help develop the skills that would set them apart. But here was the challenge: how do you keep young players engaged in repetitive stickhandling drills? How do you train them to keep their heads up while developing the crucial hand-eye coordination that separates good players from great ones?

He knew that traditional training methods alone wouldn't be enough, so he put his software engineering skills to work. But he didn't build it alone.

The girls became his lead product testers and co-designers. They spent countless hours in the basement, testing early versions of the app, pushing the limits of the tracking system, and making crucial suggestions on what made the games actually fun instead of just feeling like work.

Together, they developed an app that uses on-device machine learning to track puck movement in real-time, creating engaging games and drills that force head-up training. It needed to be responsive enough for elite training but accessible enough for young players. It needed to work at home, in the driveway, anywhere they could set up a training space.

What started as a family project to help three young girls pursue their PWHL dreams has evolved into VirtualDangle - a comprehensive training platform that's now helping players of all ages and skill levels improve their stickhandling, reaction time, and cognitive processing on the ice.